Amusement and theme parks are popular worldwide with hundreds of millions of people visiting the parks each year. Park operators continuously seek new designs for rides that attract and continue to entertain guests. One well known ride design is a spinning vehicle or tea cup ride available at many theme parks. In this ride, small turntables (e.g., three turntables in some rides) are used to hold two to six or more vehicles. The riders or passengers enter the vehicles and, during the ride, are able to manually rotate their individual vehicle about a mounting location on the turntable independent of the other vehicles. Also, during the ride, each of the small turntables is rotated about its center axis while a larger turntable supporting the small turntable is also rotated in the same or an opposite direction.
To increase the thrill in such spinning vehicle and/or spinning turntable rides, ride designers often create near-miss or demolition derby interaction among the vehicles. The intent of these rides is to safely provide close interaction between passenger vehicles in a non-intuitive manner. For example, car-shaped vehicles may be provided in a near-miss theme park attraction. The vehicles may be located on one of four spinning plateaus or turntables. The vehicles change or move among the spinning plateaus during the ride while nearly missing other passing-by vehicles so that a passenger may not end the ride on the plateau that they began on in the attraction. Another close comparable for this type of ride are figure 8-type demolition rides that include spinning vehicles that are moved along a figure 8 track and have near-miss interactions at the crossing point of the track.
Existing spinning turntable, near-miss rides have been relatively popular over the years but present a number of problems for park operators. The existing rides are all based on a similar design that requires exact turntable synchronization. The rides may also use a relatively complex, high-wear handoff mechanism to move vehicles from one turntable to another, which increases maintenance and operating costs. The movements in the ride can also become predictable as the vehicles are constrained to a circular path of constant radius with no straight sections of track, with all vehicles following the same path throughout the ride in the same order.
Hence, there remains a need for an amusement park ride that provides a near-miss vehicle interaction between multiple vehicles. Preferably, such a ride would be less predictable or more non-intuitive than existing rides while providing a relatively low complexity design with acceptable maintenance requirements.